John Alexander was born in 1945 in Beaumont, Texas. John received his MFA from Southern Methodist University in 1970 before joining the faculty of the University of Houston. In the late 1970s he left Texas for New York, where his reputation as one of America's most compelling figurative painters flourished.

He is known for his satirical approach to rendering the relationships between nature and man. Alexander describes his approach as “nature at its grandest and man at his worst”.

His work appears in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among many others.